


the wanting comes in waves

by oxfordarmadillo



Category: The Witcher
Genre: F/M, Fluff, M/M, Smut, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, jaskier and yennefer get drunk and make bad decisions, lil bit angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24006928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordarmadillo/pseuds/oxfordarmadillo
Summary: “Oh, I’m plenty flexible. Ask the Countess de Stael.” He flashes her his usual devilish grin before he has a good chance to think over what he’s doing, and it actually gets a laugh out of her, and it makes him grin more. A moment of warmth, like the sunshine in spring, that’s aided by the ale and passes just as quick. He hums, like Geralt hums, and folds his knees up under him, sitting on the table’s surface while she props up her face in her hands from the bench.“So what do you want?” he asks her. “If we’re talking wants. What… does Yennefer of Vernerberg… truly, deeply, madly desire?”
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 5
Kudos: 64





	the wanting comes in waves

When Jaskier’s pissed off he conducts arguments in his own head. It’s a long day’s trek down the mountain and Jaskier spends the bulk of it shooting dirty looks at his witcher (a witcher he can’t seem to stop thinking of as his) and trying to has the whole thing out, as if anything he can say will make a single bit of difference. “Lover’s quarrel?” Yen says, “I thought you were going to run off to the coast together,” Yen says, and that’s the last time Jaskier breathes a word in confidence to that particular witch; if Geralt has anything to say about it, he doesn’t share it with Jaskier. He moves down the path like a mountain lion.

I didn’t, he wants to say. You brought this on yourself, you did, all I ever did was be there for you, that’s all I’ll ever do if you ask me, but you won’t ask me, will you? Two decades in and Geralt can’t say the word friend; maybe it was a mistake to ever think they’d get there, but Jaskier had believed, just thought him gruff, impatient, a bear of a man (a wolf of a man) sure but surely he’d come around in time? What hurts more, what happened or the fact that he could’ve seen it coming miles away if only he’d looked?

He won’t call for him again.

“He used to,” Jaskier says. It’s one too many ales in at the tavern down near the path, and he doesn’t know why, exactly, Yennefer of Vengerberg is sitting in this near-empty pub with him at going-on-midnight listening to him bitch, and what’s more, he doesn’t know why he’s giving her an inch of ammunition, but the ale loosens his lips. She’s pretty to look at, anyway, pretty in a deadly sort of way, not that Jaskier is looking.

“Don’t ever let him tell you he didn’t want me there,” Jaskier says. He’s lying on his back on top of a table the surface of which is probably doing ugly, sticky things to his doublet, but also he doesn’t care right now. “I knew what he wanted. Thought I did, anyway. And what do you want?” He cranes his neck up to better look at her, ethereal beauty in the middle of this dingy place; she could do a lot better, and has done a lot better, than this and him; he doesn’t know why she’s here.

“Isn’t that the question?” Yen says, and he can’t stand it, the way she seems to smile and smirk at the same time.

“Besides,” she says, “it isn’t so much about what he wants anymore, is it? I’ve been listening for over an hour and I still can’t work out what it is you want.”

“Didn’t know you were asking.”

“You usually don’t need someone to ask.” Her elbows are propped up on the table; it’s unladylike. He rather likes that. Something unladylike about her. An imperfection. Gotta dig deep for those when you’re talking to Yennefer of Verngerberg. “So what is it that pleases you?” she asks. “The coast? Geralt? Growing old together? You know he won’t grow old.”

“You must be desperate for someone to talk to, if you’re talking to me.” Jaskier sits up, finally, holding his arms out to steady himself as the near-empty pub begins to spin around him. “I must be desperate for someone to talk to, if I’m talking to you,” he snaps. “Didn’t you try to kill me last time?”

She shrugs.

He’s too drunk for it to really matter, too angry at the world to be angry at her specifically. “If he’d just bend,” Jaskier says, wiping a few crumbs off his doublet (he is a mess, and his hair is askew, and her eyes are on him and he doesn’t know why), “I don’t want to break him. I don’t want him to break. Just bend. Just a little. I don’t need sunsets and serenades, I just want him to… bend.”

“Geralt isn’t flexible,” she says. “You, on the other hand -”

“Oh, I’m plenty flexible. Ask the Countess de Stael.” He flashes her his usual devilish grin before he has a good chance to think over what he’s doing, and it actually gets a laugh out of her, and it makes him grin more. A moment of warmth, like the sunshine in spring, that’s aided by the ale and passes just as quick. He hums, like Geralt hums, and folds his knees up under him, sitting on the table’s surface while she props up her face in her hands from the bench.

“So what do you want?” he asks her. “If we’re talking wants. What… does Yennefer of Vernerberg… truly, deeply, madly desire?”

He expects her to give some variation on the theme of power. That’s what girls like her crave, isn’t it? Power. He expects naked ambition and unbridled need. “I want to be a mother,” she says, and he was expecting a lot, but he wasn’t expecting that.

“You can stop gaping now,” she snaps, and it’s true, he’s slack jawed, just staring at her. Jaskier laughs his disbelief, and for once he’s not trying to offend, it just…

Her? A mother? “Why?” he asks. “You could have anything. You could have anyone, and you want… what. A squalling little infant suckling at those gorgeous teets? Shit stains and stretch marks? What, do you just want the one thing you can’t have? Are you that kind of insatiable?”

She’s quiet. Jaskier isn’t sure if he’s struck a nerve, at first, until she gets this tic in her jaw and this look in her eye like you’ve pissed on her mother’s grave and she stands up, and all at once she is Yennefer of Vernerberg, and he understands why she doesn’t want power. It’s because she already has it.

“You all think so little of me,” she says.

“Hey, I called your tits gorgeous. Hey, wait -” and it’s drunkenness, that’s all, that keeps her from evading his grasp when he slides off the table and reaches for her arm. “Wait, I didn’t mean it, I don’t mean anything,” he says; he doesn’t like pleading but he’ll do it, if it keeps him from sleeping off this idiot inebriation by himself and waking up alone to a hell of a hangover.

“Maybe that’s your problem,” she snaps, still angry. “None of you mean anything -” and Jaskier understands; this isn’t about him.

“This is about Geralt.” The one who brought them together and the one that pushed them both away. He’s good at understanding. Better than people give him credit for. 

__

“So tell me what you’re going to do,” he says. “Tell me what you’re going to do to get a baby.” There was only one bed left by the time they stumbled upstairs. Yennefer has the coin to sequester them apart from the rabble that usually frequent this place; it’s nicer digs that he and Geralt usually afford, anyway. Jaskier has stretched out across the king-sized bed and she’s still standing, watching him as he lounges; she seems the more sober, out of the two of them, but then, she always seems sharp, and always out of his reach.

So it’s stunning, when she moves closer, when she sits on the edge of the bed. Like being touched by something divine, and she isn’t even touching him yet (and he refuses to admit that he wants that, or at the very least wonders what it’s like). Yen pulls up her skirt, undoes her long boots. Sheds them like a snake shedding skin, just out of his reach, like a flower beckoning to a hummingbird, and curls them underneath her body, sitting, just outside of his grasp, just close enough that he can imagine what it might be like to touch her.

“Anything and everything I have to,” she says. That’s what the dragon hunting was all about. Rare fertility treatment. Nothing to do with Sir Eyck and his glory, something in it for her.

“Well, I think it’s grand,” he drawls. “No, really,” when she shoots him a look, “no, it took me a second, but I think it’s wonderful. Mother Yen and her bouncing bundle of joy. I’ll write him a little song when he’s born. Or her. It? It doesn’t seem right.”

She’s quiet. Drink makes her quiet; Jaskier is learning this. He is learning her, bits and pieces, like he learned Geralt, over the course of two decades. He’s not sure that Geralt would like this. He’s also not sure that he cares.

“Look,” he says. “We don’t have to -” and it’s important to him that she understands that really, really, they don’t have to. She might owe him a lot but she doesn’t owe him sex; sex isn’t transactional to Jaskier, it’s supposed to be something more than that - call him a romantic, say he’s cliched, but there’s only one bed and the mind draws its own conclusions.

“I never do anything I don’t want to,” she says. And when she kisses him, she does it bodily; when she kisses him, she’s like a maelstrom, the way Geralt is like a maelstrom when he’s angry, and it’s something, isn’t it, for a woman to take him like this, for a woman to climb on top of him with fierce and sudden energy and decide that she’s in control. And for what it’s worth Jaskier is just drunk enough not to wonder if this is a bad idea, just drunk enough that the stupidest idea in the world seems kind of sexy and fun, and of course he’s hard for her, of course, of course, of course she can summon lust from deep within his stomach easy as breathing, and she bites down on his neck and he rolls up inside of her, bodies thrumming -

She’s wet for him, she’s wet for him, he’s touched her in that way, and maybe he’s thinking about Geralt, maybe she’s thinking about Geralt, maybe they’re both fucking thinking about Geralt but maybe it doesn’t actually matter. Her dress isn’t even all the way off before she’s riding him hard, riding him like she wants something; when she wants something, she gets it, and right now she wants him.

And he could swear his eyes are rolling into the back of his head; he could swear she’s working some kind of magic, that’s how good it feels. His fingers clutch at the breasts he so rudely called tits, and it’s something like worship, the way they come together, at least the only kind of worship that Jaskier has ever known.

And it’s not right, it’s not the right person, not for him and not for her, but the noises she makes as she writhes on top of him make all of that just kind of sort of float away. Right and wrong and all the rest of it, it doesn’t really matter anymore, it’s just him and it’s just her and in a different universe, in a different world, this would be making a baby, and she could get what she wants.

She’s ruthlessly efficient and collapses next to him in a heap when they’re done and maybe it’s the drink but he’s pretty sure he hears her say his name. He closes his eyes and it’s Geralt saying his name, Geralt, calling to him, a different universe, a different world, one where Geralt allowed himself to bend, one where Jaskier got what he wanted, too.

The wanting comes in waves, and Jaskier fights for breath like a man drowning. “It doesn’t need to mean anything,” he says, and he hears her murmur something close to assent; no, no, it doesn’t need to mean anything at all.

___

He’s thinking about wanting when he wakes up to find her gone. His dreams are blind and nameless and he wakes up to an empty bed, and he spends a long time putting himself together, trying to get a little of the grease and the drink out of his doublet before showing up downstairs. When Jaskier’s anxious, he rehearses in his head. We’re fine, right? We’re fine? I know I’m not who you want and you know you’re not who I want but that doesn’t mean anything - it didn’t mean anything last night. I don’t expect it to ever happen again. I don’t expect anything from you.

But when he makes it downstairs, she’s gone.

He doesn’t ask the innkeeper which way she swept out of town. He won’t go looking for her, not if she doesn’t want to be found; maybe he’ll never see either one of them again, and the thought makes him ache, but maybe it’s okay to ache. Maybe it’s okay to spend his whole life yearning, never quite getting there. Maybe it has to be okay, because that’s all he’s ever going to get.

So he sings for his supper and he writes a new song and he travels the continent, singing of Geralt of Rivia, singing in hopes that someday the witcher will call for him again - singing in hopes he’d be found.


End file.
